The most common of automated machines for terminating wires to terminals are those that feed a single wire from a reel of wire to a cutting station for severing into segments. One or both ends of these wire segments are usually terminated to terminals which include crimping a first portion of the terminal to the conductor of the wire segments and a second portion of the terminal to the insulation of the wire segments. Such machines are set up to process a given type and size of wire for a particular production run, and the terminal applicators are manually adjusted for the wire crimp height and insulation crimp height, neither of which need be changed until an out of tolerance condition exists or another production run set up is initiated with a different type or size wire. Other automated machines, such as is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,879,934 which issued Nov. 14, 1989 to Adlon et al. and U.S. Pat. application Ser. No. 477,185, which was filed on Feb. 5, 1990 and assigned to the Assignee of the present invention, both of which are incorporated by reference as if set forth verbatim herein, have the capability of selecting a wire to be terminated from a supply of several different wire types and sizes. Such machines include a number of terminal applicators and associated presses so that the selected wire may be terminated to a desired terminal that is appropriate for the type and size of the wire. However, as with the single wire machines, the wire crimp height and insulation crimp height are manually set so that as different wire types or sizes are selected, they must be presented to the appropriate applicator for termination. There is no means by which the wire crimp height or insulation crimp height can be reset during production to accommodate wires of differing sizes and types. Such a means for fine adjusting the crimp height to keep it within tolerance during production is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,916,810 which issued Apr. 17, 1990 to Yeomans, and is incorporated by reference as if set forth verbation herein. The Yeomans disclosure, however, does not show the function of identifying a subsequent different wire and automatically resetting the crimp height for the different wire.
The present invention performs this function with respect to automatically adjusting the insulation crimp height in response to the selection of a wire that requires an insulation crimp height different than that of the previously selected wire.